books of the Jews as
prophesying of his Mission. None of these Prophecies can be understood of
him but in a _typical allegoric_ sense. Now that sense is absurd, and
contrary to all scholastic rules of interpretation. Christianity,
therefore, not being really predicted in the Jewish Writings, is
consequently false."[22]

Collins continued his attack upon Christian revelation in the _Scheme_. In
the two years which separated this work from the earlier _Grounds and
Reasons_, there occurred no change in the author's argument. What does
occur, however, is a perceptive if snide elaboration upon the mask. This
is in many ways the same persona who barely suppressed his guffaws in the
earlier work. Now he is given an added dimension; he is made more
decisively rational than his predecessor and therefore more insightful in
his knowledge of rhetorical method. As a disciple of certain Protestant
polemicists and particularly of Grotius, whose "integrity," "honor," and
biblical criticism he supports, he is the empirical-minded Christian who
knows exactly why the literalists have failed to persuade the
free-thinkers or even to have damaged their arguments. "For if you begin
with Infidels by denying to them, what is evident and agreeable to common
sense, I think there can be no reasonable hopes of converting or
convincing them."[23] The irony is abrasive simply because it unanswerably
singles out the great rhetorical failure of orthodoxy, its inability to
argue from a set of principles as acceptable to the deists as to
themselves.

Many of the clergy chafed against Collins's manipulation of this
tongue-in-cheek persona. They resented his irreverent wit which projected,
for example, the image of an Anglican God who "talks to all mankind from
corners" and who shows his back parts to Moses. They were irritated by his
jesting parables, as in "The Case of Free-Seeing," and by the impertinence
of labelling Archbishop Tillotson as the man "whom all _English
Free-Thinkers_ own as their Head."[24]

But most of all they gagged upon Collins's use of satire in religious
controversy. As we have already seen, there were complex reasons for his
choice of technique. He was a naturally witty man who, sometimes out of
fear and sometimes out of malice, expressed himself best through
circuitous irony. In 1724, when he himself considered his oratorical
practice, he argued that his matter determined his style, that the targets
of his belittling wit were the "saint-errants." We can only imagine the
exasperation of Collins's Anglican enemies when they found their orthodoxy
thus slyly lumped with the eccentricities of Samuel Butler's "true blew"
Presbyterians. It would be hard to live down the associations of those
facetious lines which made the Augustan divines, like their unwelcome
forebear Hudibras, members

Of that stubborn Crew
Of Errant Saints, whom all men grant
To be the true Church Militant.

Those dignified Anglican exteriors were further punctured by Collins's
irreverent attack upon their cry of religious uniformity, a cry which was
"ridiculous, romantick, and impossible to succeed." He saw himself, in
short, as an emancipated Butler or even Cervantes; and like his famous
predecessors he too would laugh quite out of countenance the fool and the
hypocrite, the pretender and the enthusiast, the knave and the persecuter,
all those who would create a god in their own sour and puny image.

III

By 1727 several of the orthodox felt that they could take no more of
Collins's laughter, his sneering invectives against the clergy, or his
designs to make religion "a Matter purely personal; and the Knowledge of
it to be obtain'd by personal Consideration, _independently of any Guides,
Teachers, or Authority_." In the forefront of this group was John Rogers,
whose hostility to the deist was articulate and compulsive. At least it
drove him into a position seemingly at odds